5

I’d noticed military convoys on our way to the valley. It was unusual here. I’d been too preoccupied to give this much thought. The trucks were as twitchy as buffalo tails, creeping up and down the valley’s spine, seeing nothing, fearing the worst. The whole country was teeming with convoys of one kind or another. So what? We were here to enjoy the place, even if we couldn’t enjoy the time.

A shadow flickered on the door frame. A lizard, sidling for a mate.

I courted Farhana with calla lilies. Nothing delighted me more than descending the hill into the Mission District where she lived with a potted plant in my arms. I knew the flower shops with the widest varieties, from white to mauve to yellow, some with funnels as long and slender as her wrists, slanting in the same way her braid embraced her spine that first time we met, and still embraced her each night as she torqued her body to undress. I longed to photograph that spine but she wouldn’t let me. So instead, with my naked eye, I watched her fingers undo the knots of her braid.

Sometimes, she pulled me out of bed, to recline at her five-sided bay window. It pitched so far out into the street she claimed it was the one that caused the city to pass an ordinance limiting the projection of all bay windows. We’d sit there, nestled in glass in a purple house. Even by San Francisco’s standards, the house was spectacular. Slender spiralling columns at the alcove, each with gold rings, like cufflinks on a white and crinkly sleeve. Halfway down the door of unfinished wood ran a tinted oval glass. Mirror, mirror, she’d giggle, the first few times I kissed her there. The bedroom balcony – with little gold-tipped minarets – is where I left her calla lilies, like an offering to the god of extravagance. Art-glass windowpanes under the roof.

At the window, we watched others on the street.

At the window, she asked, ‘What’s the most beautiful thing you ever witnessed? I mean, a moment.’

At the window, we played opposites. The Mission was once moist, fecund. In contrast, the stark, wind-swept Richmond where I lived was once a desolate bank of sand. We said she sprang from marsh, I from desert. She loved the damp closeness of curves, the rich debris of glaciers and deltas. She loved her gloves and her socks. I, though always cold, hated to cover my extremities. I preferred the exposed, violent beauty of the Pacific coast to the secret tides of the protected bays. We said ‘opposites attract’ and we were right. Converging is what divided us.

On her first birthday after we met, in one hand I held a calla lily with a lip pinker than hers, in the other, a bottle of champagne. She kissed me and said she knew what she wanted instead.

‘What?’

‘Let me show you.’

I shut my eyes, counted to ten, opened them. ‘So where is it?’

‘Not here, silly. Let’s go for a walk. To your neighbourhood, the one you love to photograph, with all the cliffs and the cypresses.’ She rolled her eyes as though cliffs and cypresses were toys for men.

It was an especially cold day in May and though I did love the bluffs, I’d been hoping for a more close-fitting day. Call it role reversal. I chilled the champagne and headed for the bay window to, well, anticipate some tidal advances. The last time we’d made love I’d teased that her needs were growing as strong as the tides rushing up the channels of a salt marsh, and inshallah they’d also be twice daily.

Well, it was not to be.

She’d planned the route. First, the Sutro Baths, which looked especially green and scummy that day, thick as a Karachi sewer.
We watched the pelicans. Dark hunkered shadows, sometimes in gangs of twenty or more, closing in on the fecund orgy at the microbe-gilded pools like evil clouds, like missiles. They launched headlong, scattering the seagulls and the swifts, dropping one after the other in a heavy, gut-wrenching fall. A rain of bombshells. The invasion mesmerized us.